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EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES ON EVALUATION AND SELECTION OF NAVIGATIONAL LINKS ON WEBAuthor: VAMSHI VELAGAPURI Date: 2019-03-27 Report no: IIIT/TH/2019/39 Advisor:Bipin Indurkhya AbstractUsers navigating the web often deviate from the intended path and find themselves in a state of being lost. Early research shows, different cognitive factors such as domain knowledge, spatial ability, working memory, and prior experience contributes to the successful navigation. Existing cognitive models such as CoLiDeS, CoLiDeS+, CoLiDeS+Pic, MESA, and SNIF-ACT provide deeper analysis to understand the user behavior on the web. At the end, the goal of these models is to help the practitioners of the web in evaluating “the effectiveness of their designs”, in terms of user navigation. These models consider the selection process of a link as the key step in navigation and do so by measuring the semantic similarity of the link with respect to the goal. However, they do not completely account for all types of cognitive factors, and also the position of the links and content on a web page in the selection process. In this work, we present the results from two eye tracking studies conducted to understand the user behaviour during the link selection process. We observed that the users select a link with maximum similarity to the goal (information scent) and the information scent is always increased in a successful navigation path. We have also observed that the position and the information scent has not affected the way users attend the links. Although existing models do not consider the content while evaluating the links, we noticed that users spent significant amount of time in attending the content during the selection process. By comparing CoLiDes+ with Information Search process, we also found that the users feel more uncertain during the link selection stage of CoLiDes+. Incorporating all these observations, we modelled a tool to assist in navigation to reduce the user uncertainty and disorientation. While the above studies consider the user behavior as goal-oriented, often users browse without any predefined goal to start with. In this context, we carried out a behavioral study to understand the role of cognitive factors spatial ability and prior knowledge, on information seeking patterns. We observed the high spatial ability resulted in surface navigation whereas the low spatial ability resulted in deep navigation pattern. Users with high domain knowledge spent more time per page and visited less number of pages. These findings lead us to design an assistive feature by presenting the information from other sections on a given page. We believe this will result in better information discovery for the low spatial ability and the domain knowledge. Full thesis: pdf Centre for Cognitive Science |
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